Drug prices tug on the economy of healthcare

http://www.fiercehealthcare.com/finance/drug-prices-tug-economy-healthcare?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTmpjd1pURm1NR0ZqTlRWbSIsInQiOiI5MkdaMWJlaGV4dlppeWNkY1NqNTNtTFJ1MFlrcWtQQWxcL2hvYWVUK3lmNEJRT1lCVTJLQTFwdGFcL0dLWWlGMnBzbGNQbXhDdnFDVUdsdkthR3Y4UzJIVm5sT25iNHJmYWd2aGlFXC9ycVNDST0ifQ%3D%3D&mrkid=959610&utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal

Money Pills

Drug prices continue to bedevil the economics of the U.S. healthcare system in a variety of ways.

Prescription drug prices rose 7 percent between September 2015 and September of this year, according to a new report (.pdf) from the Altarum Institute’s Center for Sustainable Healthcare Spending. No other category rose more than 2.9 percent. Hospital prices rose just 1.2 percent, although that’s up significantly from the 0.7 percent annual increase between September 2014 and September of last year.

Meanwhile, Altarum’s healthcare spending report (PDF) tells a slightly different story. Prescription drug spending rose only at a 4.5 percent annual rate between September 2015 and August of this year. That’s down from the 7.2 percent growth rate from September 2014 to 2015, and the 12.4 percent rate between August 2013 and 2014.

However, hospital spending grew at a 6.6 percent annual rate in September, up from 3.4 percent between September 2014 and 2015. That’s higher than the overall 5.5 percent growth rate.

That dovetails with forecasts that U.S. healthcare spending will reach 20 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by the middle of next decade. According to Altarum, it currently amounts to 18.2 percent of GDP. But another report suggested that the Affordable Care Act will actually cut healthcare spending over the long term by $2.6 trillion.

The report, which is closely read by many healthcare policy experts but gains little attention in most media circles, raised some concerns from advocacy groups.

California Dreamin’ in a post-Trump healthcare world

http://www.fiercehealthcare.com/finance/suddenly-it-s-much-darker-california-dreaming-may-be-one-silver-lining?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal&mrkid=959610&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTmpjd1pURm1NR0ZqTlRWbSIsInQiOiI5MkdaMWJlaGV4dlppeWNkY1NqNTNtTFJ1MFlrcWtQQWxcL2hvYWVUK3lmNEJRT1lCVTJLQTFwdGFcL0dLWWlGMnBzbGNQbXhDdnFDVUdsdkthR3Y4UzJIVm5sT25iNHJmYWd2aGlFXC9ycVNDST0ifQ%3D%3D

California flag and American flag

The consensus among policymakers and observers: Not good.

“At risk is insurance coverage for literally millions of Americans,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy group Health Access California.

Jim Lott, who teaches healthcare policy at USC and Cal State Long Beach and was the longtime executive vice president of the Hospital Association of Southern California, noted that even if parts of the law are preserved the way Trump suggests, it would still be imperiled.

“If you don’t have an employer mandate and an individual mandate, the market would self-destruct,” Lott said. “It will create havoc.”

Barcellona, an attorney by training, concurred with Lott. “The law matters and these federal programs are conditioned on the act being implemented in a certain way,” he said.

Barcellona also brought up a consequence that would be utterly disastrous for millions of middle-class Americans: If the ACA is eliminated in the middle of a calendar year, it could put them on the hook for repaying billions of dollars in premium tax credits.

Here’s Why 24 Million People Still Don’t Have Health Insurance

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/08/19/Here-s-Why-24-Million-People-Still-Don-t-Have-Health-Insurance

Despite its seemingly endless political and financial travails, Obamacare has taken a big bite out of the number of uninsured Americans since it was enacted in 2010. An estimated 20 million more people are now covered by private health insurance obtained through subsidized government exchanges or expanded Medicaid for the poor.

But as the curtain begins to ring down on President Obama’s administration, roughly 20 million to 24 million people still lack health insurance, a huge piece of unfinished business that will be left to the next president and a new Congress to address. And that raises two interesting questions: precisely who are the uninsured today and why haven’t they been able to obtain coverage?

A national survey by the Commonwealth Fund conducted last February through April finds “notable shifts” in the demographic composition of the uninsured since the Affordable Care Act first took effect in 2014.

A quick snapshot of the detailed findings tells the stories of millions of people either purposefully rejecting health care insurance, not qualifying for a federal program, or being unaware of their options to acquire coverage.

The Impact of Obamacare, in Four Maps

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Three years into the Affordable Care Act, there remain places where many people still lack health insurance. But their share keeps shrinking.

The share of people without health insurance keeps falling.

Since 2013, when the major provisions of Obamacare went into effect, the uninsured rate has fallen in every state. And some states that you might not expect have led the way.

The news about the Affordable Care Act has been grim lately: The price of health plans in new marketplaces is up, and choice is declining in many places. But amid the difficulties, new data highlight the law’s effectiveness in getting coverage for millions of Americans.

Over all, the gains are substantial: a seven-percentage-point drop in the uninsured rate for adults. But there remain troublesome regional patterns. Many people in the South and the Southwest still don’t have a reliable way to pay for health care, according to the new, detailed numbers from a pair of groups closely tracking enrollment efforts. Those patterns aren’t an accident. As our maps show, many of the places with high uninsured rates had poor coverage before the Affordable Care Act passed. They tend to be states with widespread poverty and limited social safety nets. Look at Mississippi and Texas, for example.

But many of the places that have reduced their uninsured rates the most had similar characteristics in 2013. Look at Kentucky and Arkansas. Over the years, you can see them diverge sharply from their neighbors.

 

Big Changes and Big Risks Are Ahead for Health Policy

http://www.realclearhealth.com/articles/2016/11/09/big_changes_and_big_risks_are_ahead_for_health_policy__110237.html?utm_campaign=KHN%3A+Daily+Health+Policy+Report&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=37390717&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_CzB7SB8_jTflW9iZbujhPgbEgYoEGH0CmjnZCWfYQ6OhRFxv03I_g24L5CSEuvETzsbKwqacigRbc9C9fAU0zdkkgyw&_hsmi=37390717

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The election outcome itself could create more problems for the ACA. The insurance plans sold on the law’s exchanges have already experienced substantial losses due to adverse selection, leading many insurance companies to pull back on their participation. The prospect of a Trump administration steering ACA implementation may be enough to convince some of the insurers still offering products on the exchanges in 2017 to rethink their plans. If more insurance companies head for the exits, the exchanges could become even less stable than they already are.

The “replace” part of “repeal and replace” has always been the tricky part for ACA opponents, and that will also be true for the incoming Trump administration. During the campaign, Trump offered only the vaguest outline of a plan that wouldn’t come close to serving as a starting point for a workable proposal. The ACA, for all of its problems, brought many low-income households into insurance coverage, through an expansion of the Medicaid program and through heavy subsidization of the insurance plans offered on the exchanges. Unless Trump wants to preside over a massive increase in the number of Americans without health insurance during his presidency, he will have to offer a plan that ensures households with low incomes can secure health insurance in some new way.

Analysis: Time for GOP to prove it has a better plan for healthcare reform

http://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payer/analysis-time-for-gop-to-prove-it-has-a-better-plan-for-healthcare-reform?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal&mrkid=959610&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTnpkaFpqRm1ZVEZpWkdZMiIsInQiOiJxY1NBT1ZDbGdDQWsxVzRQQ21iOVwvcEVkOFdDVTBIUG9hZWllQ0tiYmFuM2lUVU52Y2JGWkxnNW9BWDJhTWNZSTVTR2QwVmdTYWdIQkFPWGdxZ3FRWlwvRXVuSFFvZ2pKa3NaTUlwU0M1YmVJPSJ9

With Donald Trump headed to the White House and his party firmly in control of Congress, Republicans will finally have a chance to prove what they’ve been saying all along: that they can produce a better version of healthcare reform than the Affordable Care Act.

It’s clear that the ACA is as imperiled as it has ever been. Trump has fervently vowed to repeal it–and with Republican control of both chambers of Congress, he may well get his wish. After all, the law’s most visible component, the exchanges, are on shaky ground as it is, with premiums rising and some health insurers retreating from the marketplaces.

Plus, President Barack Obama’s last attempt at convincing Republicans to work on fixing the ACA–not repealing it–fell on deaf ears even before the party’s resounding victory Tuesday.

What gets lost in all the talk about the ACA’s uncertain future, though, is the fact that while some insurers have struggled to make a profit in the individual marketplaces, there are other aspects of the law to which they have become quite attached.

Take Medicaid expansion, an idea championed by Democrats (and even once embraced by Vice President-Elect Mike Pence) that has been a boon to insurance companies in the form of lucrative managed care contracts. Some companies that specialize in slimmed-down Medicaid plans have also thrived on the exchanges where others have floundered.

Then there’s the ACA’s provisions that encourage the transition to value-based payments, which insurers have embraced and largely retooled their business models to reflect. Accountable care organizations, for example, have sprung up like wildfire, producing promising results for some companies.

A wholesale repeal of the ACA would also erase the law’s historic gains in reducing the uninsured rate. Though many of the newly insured have turned out to be costlier to cover than expected, such a move would still rob insurers of millions of new customers.

The question, then, becomes what will replace the law–and that’s where it gets interesting.

Trump has a plan, but it is short on details. Perhaps most visibly, he has advocated for selling insurance across state lines–a timeworn GOP talking point that many experts agree is not feasible. He would also repeal Medicaid expansion and convert Medicaid federal matching funds into a block grant, the latter of which would drastically cut Medicaid funding and coverage.

One analysis from The Commonwealth Fund says that his plan could add nearly 20 million peopleto the ranks of the uninsured, and even more if his Medicaid proposals come to fruition.

Obamacare defenders vow ‘total war’

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/obamacare-defenders-vow-total-war-231164

Donald Trump is pictured. | Getty

Shell-shocked Democrats on Capitol Hill are preparing to make a fight for Obamacare their top priority in the opening days of the Trump administration, with leading advocacy groups ready to wage “total war” to defend President Barack Obama’s universal health care program and his domestic policy legacy.

“We’ve got the battle of our lifetime ahead of us,” Ron Pollack, executive director of advocacy group Families USA, said the day after Donald Trump was elected on a pledge to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which now the law that covers 22 million people. “We’re going to have a huge number of organizations from all across the country that will participate in this effort.

But their options are limited. They have enough votes to block a total repeal of the law on Day One of a Trump administration. But they can’t block Republicans from passing targeted legislation in the coming months, and Trump — like Obama before him — can pick up a pen as early as Jan. 20 and use executive powers to block, change, or put on hold key elements of the massive six-year-old legislation.

The road to repeal is more complex than Trump acknowledged on the campaign trail. The law is baked into the health care system, touching every American’s life and a fifth of the economy.

But with the Republican sweep of both the executive and legislative branches, expectations for big and bold action are high.

Drug companies just scored a big election victory

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California voters rejected a closely watched ballot initiative aimed at capping how much most state-funded health insurance programs pay for prescription drugs, a possible bellwether of the lack of political appetite for more widespread policies to tackle high drug prices.

State agencies would have been barred from paying more than the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs does for prescription drugs. VA gets at least a 24 percent discount off the average manufacturer’s price of a drug and is insulated against price hikes larger than inflation.

Proposition 61 was losing with just 46 percent of the vote Wednesday morning, with more than 90 percent of precincts reporting.

The ballot measure was narrowly constructed and would have applied to an estimated 4.4 million people. Still, it had attracted national attention and $109 million in opposition funding, led by the pharmaceutical industry.

It was, in many ways, a test of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) sway and of the viability of a key piece of his agenda, which has involved repeated attacks on the pharmaceutical industry over drug pricing. He appeared at last-minute rallies in Sacramento and Los Angeles on Monday to support the measure, called Proposition 61.

What the 2016 presidential election could mean for the future of the ACA

http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/2016-president-election-ACA-future-healthcare/429843/

At the federal level, the nation’s two major political parties have vastly different visions for the future of healthcare. The election will help to determine which course the nation follows for the foreseeable future. What are the likely outcomes depending on who wins the presidency?

California’s Drug Price Initiative: Will Voters ‘Send A Signal To Washington’?

California’s Drug Price Initiative: Will Voters ‘Send A Signal To Washington’?

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This year, Mary O’Connor and her father made voting a family affair.

O’Connor’s father is a Vietnam veteran, so she was especially interested in his views on Proposition 61, a California ballot measure that would peg the state’s payments for prescription drugs to prices paid by the Department of Veterans Affairs. It’s widely believed the federal program for military personnel gets some of the deepest discounts in the country.

“We researched it a lot,” said O’Connor, a 24-year-old from Sacramento. Both decided to vote yes because drug prices are “ridiculous” and need to be reined in, she said. “We have seen that things cannot remain the way they are.”

The measure faces strong opposition from the pharmaceutical industry, which has poured at least $109 million into defeating it. In addition, some state policy experts and consumer advocates say the measure may not save taxpayers or patients any money, and could even do more harm than good. Many veterans’ groups have voiced opposition as well, saying the initiative will raise VA drug spending, but proponents have support from some veterans as well.

But these warnings haven’t swayed — or reached — voters who want lawmakers to just do something to lower drug prices.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has taken up their cause, suggesting passage of Proposition 61 is important to the nation as a whole.